Hey there! I'm Austin Kobylarczyk, a composer/arranger/orchestrator based in Wisconsin, USA. I write all types of music, for all types of soloists or groups, in any style that catches my fancy! I hope you can find something here you enjoy.
I don't know exactly which one it's, but in the North of Argentina it's called a pincullo. These one a bit rare to see, most people I know use a quena but it's mucho more difficult to play
HI Austin. This was a wonderful, honest review. I rarely comment on anything but wanted to tell you (assuming you may read this) that I realize it took courage for you to do this video. I can see that you are, like many talented people, painfully shy about recording video but you did GREAT! You mentioned it's your first youtube video. If it matters, I'd like to encourage you to continue this path. I am about to purchase this book on your recommendation. I am a singer, not arranger who has recently inherited several original Nelson Riddle charts for Big Band and can't wait to read this! Thank you. Good work. Good luck in your arranging in the future. Frances
Thank you so much for your kind words! Comments like yours really make making these kind of videos feel rewarding, and I can’t thank you enough for your encouragement. I really don’t know if it’s possible for me to truly describe how wonderful this book is, and I truly hope you find it useful or even just enjoyable.
I think 31-EDO is the most useful of the higher end of divisions, because it gives you an emotional palette that is more nuanced than 12-TET , or even lesser divisions, without being too granular in my opinion. That being said, if you need fractions of a cent to express your emotion, do it, even if we cannot notice it, it'll still be important. Ben Johnston's 7th string quartet work is ridiculous insofar as it was actually performed by real musicians and did it JUSTice (hehe) Zheanna Erose is the one that put me on to 31-EDO.
While I can’t comment on which divisions might be the most useful, or even my favorite, without a little more research, I completely agree with the idea that one should always write what they feel is important. Ben Johnston’s string quartets are definitely one of the best examples of that in my mind, even if they’re a bit rough for beginners to the world outside 12tet (speaking from experience. My first listen was was his 10th, and I was not ready for it) Zheanna Erose seems like an interesting figure to me. I’ve heard one of her improvisations, but I’ve yet to watch any of the theory videos I know she has. I’m saving those for a day when I have the time to absorb it all
I don’t doubt that that’s true - but I think it shouldn’t be. Profiting off of blatant misinformation and misrepresented facts is scummy at a minimum. I’d be less upset if it was just outdated research that would later be disproven, but a lot of what he said was not that in the slightest.
fun video! once i was using beep box and i was messing around with the randomizer for my instrument and it made this sound that sounded like horrible human screaming. genuinely freaked me out a little, it sounded so real O_o
it was great to see you guys messing around with the music tool i use on the daily haha, just thought you guys should have looked into the preference menus more since thats where you get channel muting and the octave scroll bar. reason i recommended jummbox instead of beepbox is mainly because of the mod channels (you could change the bass volume mid song with this) and properly named scales. happy beepboxing
So, the issue is that 12 TET has destroyed western music theorist's ability to actually understand how music works. Consequently, we don't have notation systems that work with microtonal systems, because we don't really have a common understanding of music that expands into the microtonal notation space. We don't know if we need a new notation system for every tuning, or if there is some way to notate music that can independently handle almost any tuning. I believe in the existence of the latter, but I'm far from understanding music well enough to propose a sensible system.
An interesting thesis! I actually just picked up a book that seems to have a similar argument, though I haven’t had the chance to read it yet - Ross Duffin’s “How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony.” I like the idea that there is a notation system that would be able to handle every tuning system possible, but I also enjoy the sound of the challenges that having a unique system for every tuning might bring - or even how similar systems might be able to work with a similar base like 12tet and 24tet can. I do think that the biggest challenge for a shared notation system across all tunings, like you said, would have to be a lack of common understandings that could cause notation to bridge the gaps between all of them.
12TET hasn't "destroyed western music theorist's ability to actually understand how music works." How music actually works is only partially related to understanding this or that theory (or this or that tuning system). For example, learning the rules of counterpoint can help you understand the inner workings of some music, but that doesn't teach you "how music works". We do have various notation systems for a variety of microtonal systems. Some are more comprehensive than others, some put more focus on one aspect over another, but many systems exist and are in use currently. More comprehensive systems include sagittal, and cent deviations; ones that are comprehensive to a specific framework include Ups and Downs (ETs) and HEJI (JI); and ones that exist for specific instruments or scales also exist and are plentiful.
Wonderful video. :) I started off with Chrome Music Lab, then moved to Beep Box, and now I take my beep box midis and put them into FL Studio with game sound fonts. Thank you Chrome Music Lab for helping me make music 🙏
@@austinkobycomposer its actually a pretty capable little web music thing, its got a whole community too. whenever you get to it, i just hope you have fun!
I've been chasing melodies since i was 3, and im now 54, and a look in my bookshelf i found this book that I had never read, so thats why i came to your video. Seems that i should revive my relation to Hindemith, first and foremost the chapter on melodies. Thanx for the introduction :)
Yes that's true, and you can play them with a trombone or a violin. Or at least in theory, if you were accurate enough. But if you have access to every and any frequency then there is no structure to the music and you risk creating harmonic mush. Limiting yourself to a scale lets you create and discover discrete patterns which is what harmony is all about in my opinion.
I find it interesting how you dedicated so much time to the "Why Microtonality?" page; it goes to show how much the amount of work put in some individual pages can completely change the experience of a new visitor on the wiki. It can indeed be difficult for a new visitor to find the beginner-friendly content among the wiki's thousands of pages, and even some pages marked as "for beginners" are barely more beginner-friendly than their "expert" counterpart. 😅 I expected the "Listen" page to come up (other than in the intro animation at 1:06), since it's probably one of the most useful pages on the wiki for a newcomer. The "Scores" page was a good alternative choice though. 😉 Overall, the wiki is a huge work in progress, and for that reason any form of feedback is helpful, including this video, so thank you for making it!
A big part of why I really enjoy doing this kind of exploration is kind of getting a chance to show people what my first experience with something is. In cases like this, where it can function as helpful or useful feedback, I’m even more excited :). So, yeah, I hope this helps inform the new visitor experience in some small way, because there’s a really cool community around all of this!
30:05 yay it's me, nice video and fair commentary. But yeah, the impenetrability of the subject (and wiki lol) and scarcity of good beginner materials is a known fact, however progress is being made on that recently. It's just too bad that a lot of the people that have the skills and knowledge to create such resources are too busy with further xen explorations (me) or with other life stuff, you know how it is. Anyway, if anyone out there is confused by the wiki and wants to learn more about xenharmonics then the discord server is your best resource, folks here have a lot of fun helping out. And just a small correction, the XA Discord server was started in 2017 not 2021. 👍
Nice book, I remember when I was studying guitar at university, a friend lent me this book and it blew my mind, though I was not prepared at that time for most part of the informatioon, it really gave me a wide open mind and lots of elements to create music and a lot of diferent composer names that I didnt know as well. Greetings from Argentina 🙏
One thing people should maybe consider with the xen wiki is that unlike wikipedia or most wikis the xen wiki is largely made up of original research and ideas by the people who are developing them or by people sort of compiling information from those people and correcting/touching it up based on their own thoughts/original research. This can cause some trouble at times but xenharmonic theory is still being developed so its basically unavoidable, also this means the contributors and contributions are somewhat limited to the subjects they are interested in and have worked on/done research on, which tends not to be ethnomusicologists or historians or perhaps surprisingly people who study psychoacoustics, most of it is really about scale construction and scale properties. So while you can trust the gist of things said about other cultures tuning systems you should maybe take it with a grain of salt as they arent always based on many studies or first hand knowledge from someone immersed in the culture themselves, but rather likely someone from the west trying to interpret what they are hearing or seeing in a tuner and putting it together to judge what sort of structure theyre aiming for, they dont necessarily know the actual practices, or at least its inconsistent when they do and when they dont (though there are some who know about a specific form of music relevant to the type of music they make and study, its just very case by case), though as they likely judged off listening you can at least be comfortable knowing it should help if you want to sound like that type of music. Maqam is actually covered fairly well elsewhere online, its very different from how im used to approaching music though, the order of notes and when you play them are not as arbitrary and up in the air as with western music where you can just play any note of ionian whenever even entirely randomly, its more like playing aeolian or melodic minor depending on which direction you are going, so whenever a tuning references a maqam it can really be slightly dubious as the tuning alone is not all there is to a maqam. Personally i quite like the reasons listed for why microtonality, i think just "sounding nice" really constitutes a limited range of things that sound nice, having these options lets you pursue and convey more ideas more clearly and perhaps even have more ideas as some tunings/scales have sounds and vibes that i find difficult to describe even once i get used to them i really have no idea the extent of their effect. Which is somewhat connected to another point which is that often you cant really tell right out the gate what does and doesnt sound nice, some things may not sound nice untill you hear them enough or in the right context, 12edo is very engrained in people especially those with pre existing musical training/experience so often if you followed your first impression only... it might all sound bad because itd all still sound "out of tune" but after that passes theres still dissonance and categorical perception of things that land in between the familiar categories, like if you split a fourth or sixth in half you can get intervals that arent neutral and dont have an immediately recognized function, but this is really a result of the structure of 12edo, which is also a really wierd edo in the scheme of things, being highly composite.
Yeah, those all seem like pretty important points to keep in mind. I enjoy exploring spaces like these, where everything is kind of in flux, because, like you said, this information is coming from people working to develop or compile it first hand. And I do think my “do it if you think it sounds nice” comment can come off a little differently than I meant it, but my belief with all types of composition/song writing, wether it’s in 12EDO or 51ED3 or anything at all, is that one should use techniques and effects that fit what they’re looking for. For example, I happen to use a fair amount of heavy dissonances in my writing, which I will admit is not the prettiest sound in the world, but in the context of how I use it, it’s an effective tool - which is what makes it sound ‘nice’ to me. And thanks for the huge response! Are you a member of the wiki or any of the community around it?
At 12:45 , contrary motion describes when interval become wider *or* narrower. in the example, the motion of the major third was going narrower, as the third goes down a quartertone and the root rises a quartertone, the interval becomes a minor third because the interval is a semitone tighter
I love the versatility of the electric bass! I also play electric bass, and some of the most interesting moments I’ve had playing music have come from that.
Arbitrary scales, my god...has this "doctor" not heard of Helmholtz and his little treatise "On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music"?
He actually cites Helmholtz in his bibliography. I haven’t read “On the Sensations of Tone” so I’m not certain how well Levitin represents that in the book.
"Listening to music causes a cascade of brain regions to activate in a particular order" You indeed would hope someone's brain would respond to a stimulus the way one's brain would respond to it, that probably otherwise would have meant the person is dead...
this is hilarious and kind of amazing in its description of ineptitude. I've got this book. Been sitting on a bookshelf for some time. I will not be reading it now. So, thanks for that.
I first read Volume 1 of the three book series in 1969, I was 19 and in my second year of college. It was a difficult read. About fifteen years later, when I was teaching college level theory, I reread the first volume and the second. Sadly, my German is not good enough to make sense of the 3rd volume. However, the concepts in the first two volumes and very enlightening. His approach to analysis is an excellent alternative too Schenker's system. Although I'm not a pianist, I was able to slog my way through Ludis Tonalis which was very influential in my own compositions.
Would you recommend, then, working your way through Ludis Tonalis? I haven’t done so myself yet, but I’ve been considering it and would love to hear your opinion.
I think I found an example of what he calls the "tenor band"... about halfway through, you'll hear the tenor saxophones ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-2e3Z4ksEjVc.html
I'm not opposed to the idea of music notation reform. Not in the least! Something I'd like to see these sorts of organizations do, that I've never seen put forward is testing if any of these systems are actually easier to learn or use. It's all well and good to hypothesize that a particular system should be simpler to understand, but until I see some evidence that it is, I find it unconvincing.
The MNMA did manage to publish some of their results of their research and testing prior to being disbanded in ‘07. If you’re interested, on the forum, in a topic titled “Where can I find the full report on the results of the MNMA Evaluation Test,” someone has linked a pdf copy of the results summary. I haven’t had the chance to read it yet myself, but if you happen to make the time, let me know what you think!
